Mechanical Dread

The thing about Akira is that it doesn’t try to make the future look good. Katsuhiro Otomo’s film is probably the closest we’ve gotten to showing apocalypse without irony or nostalgia—just Tokyo coming apart, the architecture failing, the people smaller and smaller until they disappear. It commits to the ugliness completely. That’s what makes it a masterpiece.

But the masterpiece was always half-made by its soundtrack. Geino Yamashirugumi and Shoji Yamashiro didn’t write music that tried to redeem anything. No hopes for recovery, no moments of unexpected beauty. The score is mechanical, electronic, relentless—the sound of systems grinding down to nothing. Listen to it in isolation and it’s almost unbearable. In the film, it’s perfect. The music and the image together create something that stays with you like an injury.

Thirty years on, a group of producers took those original themes and remixed them into synthwave. Wolf Arm, Acidulé, Speed Machine, Carbon Killer, AWITW, Gregorio Franco—running the old Yamashiro melodies through a different filter. Synthwave is usually seductive, aspirational, the future imagined as stylish and dead. But the original Akira score was already synthwave before synthwave existed. Already the future reduced to pure architecture, mechanical and without mercy.

The remixes don’t change what the themes are saying. They just let you hear it from a different angle—the same bleakness, but more alive in its own way. It’s that same ruthless architecture, just heard from inside the machine instead of outside of it.